Central American mother, children from migrant caravan seeking refuge in Chicago

The Flores family left their home country of El Salvador years ago due to gang violence, living in Guatemala for awhile before ending up in Mexico. They crossed the border into the United States as part of a caravan of hundreds of people, organized by Pueblo Sin Frontreras, where they surrendered and sought asylum. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

The Flores family left their home country of El Salvador years ago due to gang violence, living in Guatemala for awhile before ending up in Mexico. They crossed the border into the United States as part of a caravan of hundreds of people, organized by Pueblo Sin Frontreras, where they surrendered and sought asylum. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Elvia MalagonChicago Tribune

The children chased each other through the house, stopping only to take turns on the trampoline or munch on Mexican sweet bread — their laughter not revealing a language barrier.

They were strangers just 24 hours before, but here they were, along with their parents, living under the same roof on Chicago’s South Side, their lives intertwined for the foreseeable future.

Maritza Flores and her three daughters traveled thousands of miles to get here, part of a Central American caravan of migrants whose push northward to seek asylum drew harsh criticism from President Donald Trump. It also prompted Chicagoans Liz Gres and Pete DeMay, along with their two young children, to invite a refugee family to live with them at their McKinley Park home.

Their worlds collided in late May, when the Flores family got the green light to move from an immigration detention center in Texas to Chicago, where their asylum case will snake its way through the courts; one university study showed it can take four-plus years for immigration cases to be decided.

With plenty of unknowns ahead, including this week’s decision by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, which could further curb the chances of asylum seekers, Flores is thankful for this chapter: living in a home, not a jail of sorts, with a family who pledged to help her and her daughters get established.

“It truly means a miracle from God,” Flores said in Spanish, hours after arriving in Chicago. “He put his angels to receive me because I never imagined coming to a strange country with people as beautiful as Liz.”

Gres, 47, and her husband DeMay, 46, don’t see throwing out the welcome mat as extraordinary. Gres’ parents were Polish immigrants and DeMay said he thinks opening their home to the Flores family is part of a larger Chicago tradition.

“We feel this is a very American thing to do,” DeMay said. “Chicago’s been a place where those fleeing persecution have gone for a long time — blacks fleeing Jim Crow in the South or people from other countries coming here for a better way of life. To me, it’s the best of America that we can do something like that.”

Joining the caravan

Flores, 39, thought the United States might be her only shot to escape the violence of her Central American homeland once and for all. She hasn’t called Santa Ana, El Salvador, home for 13 years. After her father was killed, local gang members threatened to harm her daughters if she didn’t follow their orders, she said. She fled to Guatemala and later Mexico. But each time, she said, threats resurfaced from the same Central American gang.

While in Tapachula, a city in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, she began hearing rumblings in late March of a caravan traveling to the U.S. border to seek asylum. The journey to the border is notoriously dangerous; a recent survey of migrants found more than half reported becoming victims of violence en route to the United States, according to a report published in 2017 by Doctors Without Borders. Traveling in numbers gave Flores a sense of safety, she said, if only briefly.

It wasn’t long before another worry bubbled up. Members of the caravan began talking about riding “La Bestia” — atop freight trains — through Mexico.

Flores remembers sitting on her suitcase crying, thinking about the what-ifs: her children falling off the train or being trapped on top of a moving train car with nowhere to go as someone threatened her family.

Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune

Skarleth Fernandez Flores, 6, sits on a balcony on May 20, 2018, at the home of the DeMay-Gres family, who is sponsoring her family as she, her mother and sisters seek asylum status in the United States.

Skarleth Fernandez Flores, 6, sits on a balcony on May 20, 2018, at the home of the DeMay-Gres family, who is sponsoring her family as she, her mother and sisters seek asylum status in the United States. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Ultimately, Flores and her daughters were among about 20 families who pooled their money, including some donations, to take buses to the U.S. border.

On May 4, roughly a month after setting off on their journey, the Flores family turned themselves in to U.S. Customs and Border Protection at San Ysidro, Calif., according to the family’s documents — the port of entry between Tijuana and San Diego. There, they were taken into immigration custody. Flores remembers the holding cell was cold, the lights were never turned off, and she felt like employees treated them as animals. So the women began joking among themselves to keep up everyone’s spirits, she said.

“Welcome to hell,” Flores remembers one woman calling out as a joke about their detention.

She found out soon enough that the living conditions could be tough.

Two families wait

Even as the caravan moved north through Mexico, it was drawing attention, including some angry commentary from President Donald Trump, who is pushing to tighten the border with Mexico by building a wall. In April, Trump tweeted: “The migrant ‘caravan’ that is openly defying our border shows how weak & ineffective U.S. immigration laws are” and said the nation needs lawmakers who put “America First.” Additionally, Trump’s attorney general, Sessions, warned that “smugglers and traffickers and those who lie or commit fraud will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a report in May about the caravan, arguing the group highlighted flaws in asylum policies. The group proposes that asylum seekers like those in the caravan should make their claims at a U.S. consulate in Mexico rather than at the border.

“The Administration should also pursue safe third country agreements with countries in Latin America requiring asylum seekers to first pursue asylum in those closer countries before making a claim in the U.S.,” the report stated.

In response to the administration’s remarks, the activist network Showing Up for Racial Justice did a call-out to its members, including Gres, seeking families willing to house those in the caravan, said Heather Cronk, the group’s co-director.

In Tijuana, Cronk met up with the caravan and started matching families, including Maritza Flores and her girls, with American families.

In Chicago, Gres kept up with the news of the caravan. She didn’t want to sit back and watch America turn away asylum seekers. So she looked around her own home and envisioned one of the families from the caravan starting a new life in her first-floor unit.

“I think it’s really disgusting and awful the way that the administration has been sort of taking this as if it’s some huge affront to the country that these folks are seeking asylum,” Gres said.

And, Gres said, she, DeMay and their two children — ages 4 and 6 — were only occupying the second floor of the family’s two-flat in the McKinley Park neighborhood. They had room for another family in the other unit. As union organizers, the couple have worked with immigrants and understand the legal challenges such communities face, she said. And the couple speak Spanish.

Maritza Flores and her three daughters traveled thousands of miles to get to the United States, part of a Central American caravan of migrants who pushed northward to seek asylum. Chicagoans Lis Gres and Pete DeMay and their two children invited a refugee family to live with them at their McKinley Park home. "It truly means a miracle from God," said Flores, hours after arriving in Chicago.

(Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

But even the best-laid plans can falter. A gut rehab on one flat is still in progress, so for now the Flores family is living in the same unit as the Gres-DeMay clan. And Flores’ family began fragmenting. Flores’ oldest daughter, 19, opted to stay in Mexico with her boyfriend. Then officials determined that her second-oldest daughter, 18, who made it across the border with the family, would have to make a solo plea for asylum because she’s an adult. That baffles her mother, who says she thinks they should file a single asylum case together, considering the facts of the case are the same.

“I received the threats,” Flores said in Spanish. “If I don’t do what (the gang members) want, the ones who are going to pay are my daughters.”

Flores says she and her three youngest daughters, ages 3, 6, and 16, were moved from California to the Karnes County Residential Center outside San Antonio, Texas, leaving behind the 18-year-old. The older teen remains in an immigration detention center in San Diego.

Flores says she wants her family together in Chicago, adding that the two weeks she and her girls spent in the detention center were stressful. She lost track of time, she said, recalling how she once woke her daughters for breakfast only to discover it was the middle of the night.

Flores, who earned $3 a day cleaning at the facility while her daughters took English classes and worked on art projects, also said she was offended at times by detention staff.

“They would give (us food) while wearing gloves,” she said in Spanish. “They made us appear like we were not only criminals but animals that were going to infect them.”

At one point, she enlisted the help of a therapist on staff to get through the days there.

New home in Chicago

While the detention days are behind her, aspects of Flores’ pending asylum case have the familiar ring of a criminal trial. She’s on “parole,” meaning she’s free pending the outcome of her immigration case, and has been outfitted with an electronic ankle monitor by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — not unusual, attorneys say, in such immigration cases — and must check in with the agency’s office in Chicago. If a judge does not grant her request, she and her children could be deported to Central America.

The most difficult part of this journey will likely be in court. An analysis from Syracuse University found 79 percent of asylum claims from El Salvador were denied during fiscal years 2012-2017.

This week Sessions handed down a decision that could tighten the screws even more. Immigration judges generally don’t have to consider domestic and gang violence as grounds for asylum, according to his Monday ruling. Sessions said that violence committed by “non-government actors” should not qualify for asylum. But Ashley Huebner, managing attorney for the National Immigration Justice Center, said immigration judges also will have to consider case law, particularly those in Chicago who can dig through 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rulings granting asylum to those who argued they feared gang persecution.

In addition to opening up their home, Gres and DeMay plan to use their community connections to help the Flores family find legal help. Their family members and neighbors have donated items ranging from furniture to gift cards to help the Flores family start over. Gres plans to start an online fundraising campaign to help the Flores family through the next couple of months.

Together a few weeks now, the families are settling in to a new routine. The children have been picking up English and Spanish words from each other including commands such as Vamonos or “Let’s go,” Gres said. They watch English and Spanish episodes of their favorite show — “Peppa Pig.”

Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune

Maritza Flores plays with the hair of her daughter, 16-year-old Mariana Portillo Flores, as the girl lays on her lap at Dunbar Park on May 23, 2018, in Chicago.

Maritza Flores plays with the hair of her daughter, 16-year-old Mariana Portillo Flores, as the girl lays on her lap at Dunbar Park on May 23, 2018, in Chicago. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Gres wants to enroll her 6-year-old son in a dual-language program in the fall, and the family was trying to get Flores' 16-year-old daughter into a summer program to learn English.

Flores says she’s looking even further ahead to job hunting. She wants to kick in for household expenses initially and be on the road to fully supporting her family financially. But to get a job she must obtain a work permit, something she can’t do until 150 days after she’s filed her asylum claim. And even after that, the permitting process could be lengthy.

“We aren’t looking to live in luxury,” Flores said. “We want to live with dignity, among peace and to be certain our children will grow up well without delinquency.”

For their part, Gres and DeMay say they aren’t in any hurry to collect a rent check.

Flores says she is grateful for the family’s generosity, but she can’t get out of her mind her 18-year-old daughter languishing in a detention center. That’s who she was praying for when she, her girls and Gres attended a recent Spanish-language Mass at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church. Flores cradled her youngest daughter while her 16-year-old leaned on her shoulder and dozed off.

“It was necessary for me to look for God,” Flores said. “To go and thank God because I’m here and ask him to take care of my daughter and bring her here safely.”